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| Rio Hamilton stands by a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, just after a judge officially ended Britney Spears’s conservatorship. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post) |
By Ashley Fetters Maloy
On the outskirts of the rose-colored throng, bobbing his head happily in a “Free Britney” tee, was Rio Hamilton.
He had flown in just that day, arriving at the rally outside Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles just seconds before the good-news confetti cannons burst. A judge inside had finally ended the 13-year conservatorship that had controlled Spears’s finances, movements and other aspects of her life. Rio’s flight out would leave first thing the next morning. The celebration would be just the briefest of respites from his own guardianship ordeal back in Las Cruces, N.M., where his mother, 93-year-old Dorris Hamilton, has spent more than two years under a guardianship he said they hadn’t asked for.
Rio, 58, has seen Spears in concert three times. But he didn’t come all this way just for her. He wanted to show support for others fighting conservatorship abuse: “I wanted to show them I was completely, you know, on their side,” he said. “ ‘You need me here, I’m here for you.’ ”
It would be easy, given its brief but memorable bursts into the spotlight over the past few years, to mistake the #FreeBritney movement for simply a collection of vocal, die-hard Spears fans who supported her as she fought for her freedom in court. But a formidable contingent say they have experienced guardianship or conservatorship abuse in their own lives. Now that Rio and others like him are newly organized and inspired, the aftershocks of #FreeBritney could continue to rattle the American legal system long after Spears’s victory.
Conservatorships and guardianships are typically intended to protect vulnerable individuals. (The difference between the two varies by state.) But Rio and Dorris’s story is one of many allegations of the guardianship industry overstepping beyond what a family feels is necessary.
Dorris Hamilton was one of the first Black women to attend the University of Arkansas. She met Martin Luther King Jr. before he was famous, when he came to speak nearby. She married a mathematician, and when he took a job building missiles, she moved with him to New Mexico and took a teaching job.
They divorced, but she stayed, eventually serving as the principal of a middle school for more than 20 years. She was the first Black principal in the district, and according to a representative for the district, when it came time to rename another nearby middle school last year, “Dorris Hamilton” was a popular suggestion.
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| Rio Hamilton said of Spears’s case, “It just made everything so much easier for the rest of us to really explain what was going on.” (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post) |
The Hamiltons’ guardianship battle was the subject of a February investigation by Searchlight New Mexico and a speech by Rio at a #FreeBritney rally in September. In July 2019, when Rio lived in New York, he visited his mother for his birthday and noted that the house she had lived in for a half-century had fallen into disarray. He decided he would hire a company to clean out her house on her behalf, and perhaps find some home caregiving help — so Rio and Dorris began proceedings to give Rio power of attorney.
Soon after Rio returned home, he learned that a lawyer he and Dorris had consulted about that process had “filed an emergency petition claiming my mother was incapacitated, and that I was the one who was claiming she was incapacitated,” Rio said. They were later informed that a court had approved the petition and appointed a company called Advocate Services as Dorris’s guardian, granting it control of her estate. “They had the legal authority to close all of my mother’s bank accounts, without her knowledge, transfer the money to a different account and then leave my mother going around every day to banks that she’s been banking with for more than 40 years, and having those people explain to her that she doesn’t have any control over what has happened.”
Within weeks, Rio said, Dorris had been escorted by a police officer to a hospital, then admitted to a facility that Rio describes as a home for incapacitated elderly people. Dorris, he noted, went to aerobics classes even at age 91; she can converse with almost no trouble hearing. With those kinds of abilities still intact, Rio wondered, “Why would you be in a unit where everybody who’s around you is either incapable of holding a conversation or can’t walk or talk?”
Dorris, in an interview, agreed. She hopes to move back to her house, she said, and wishes she could visit the last two living siblings of the nine she once had. “I miss being able to move about and greet people and attend meetings of various kinds,” she said. At the home where she lives now, “I’m almost locked in.”
The lawyer did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment but told Searchlight New Mexico that she had called Rio and had left a message informing him of the petition. (Rio says he is not aware of any attempt by the lawyer to contact him before Dorris’s assets were seized.) She also told Searchlight she was not separating elders from their relatives but protecting them.
Advocate Services maintained in a statement that “as guardian and conservator, it is our statutory responsibility to protect the persons self and assets. Ms. Hamilton was adjudicated to be an incapacitated person upon testimony and evidence entered. Her home was unsafe due to a 20-year infestation of mice and a hoarding situation. All evidence of which was presented to the Court.” The company has previously defended its work in an op-ed in the Las Cruces Sun News.
At first, trying to explain Dorris’s position to friends was a frustrating errand for Rio. “Even people who were genuinely interested, you could actually see when you were putting them to sleep,” Rio remembered, “because they just had no clue.” But once Spears’s case began generating national headlines earlier this year, “it just made everything so much easier for the rest of us to really explain what was going on.”
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| #FreeBritney supporters celebrate Friday in front of the courthouse in Los Angeles. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post) |
The #FreeBritney movement has also enjoyed mutually supportive relationships with other efforts to free conservatees. At a protest earlier this month in New York City, a crowd gathered outside the offices of the law firm representing the guardian of Peter Max, 84, an artist renowned for his psychedelic pop works in the 1960s. According to his daughter, Libra Max, for the past two years, Peter’s guardian has put restrictions on his children and friends’ access to him.
One of the protesters in the crowd was John Fernandes, the founder of the #FreeBritney-adjacent Touch of Rose Project. During the chants, a man walked by on his cellphone, saying, “I guess there’s, like, a Britney Spears-style thing happening to this guy.”
For Libra Max, 54, the media attention the Spears family saga has generated has been a godsend. The #FreeBritney movement was small at first, and “no one really took them seriously. But I’m actually in awe of them,” Max said. “They opened the door for stories like my father’s to be heard.”
At Friday night’s party in L.A., Max greeted Rio Hamilton with a hug, and the two posed together in a photo booth under metallic-pink Mylar balloons spelling out “#FreedBritney.”
(Peter’s personal needs guardian, Barbara H. Urbach Lissner, said in a statement to The Post that the guardianship, which began in 2016, is overseen by someone neutral “due to conflict” among his late wife and his children. She said that Peter is not isolated but receives visitors most days of the week, and that he is “well, safe, and happy.” She added, “I have done my best to help him.”)
The public’s new familiarity with conservatorships has also been a boon to Lisa MacCarley, a lawyer in Glendale, Calif., who has specialized in guardianship and conservatorship cases since 1990. Two years ago, she founded Bettys’ Hope, a charity to address abuses of these legal arrangements — and the Spears case is the kind that lawyers in her field pray to the heavens for.
In her 30 years in the legal system, MacCarley said, she has seen a lack of oversight in the probate court system lead to violation of individuals’ rights and families being financially drained while lawyers profit. “So, in my point of view, the #FreeBritney movement has been, like, literally the miracle that finally brought the whole problem, the systemic issues with our guardianship and conservatorship courts, to light.” In September, MacCarley filed an amicus brief in the Spears case, arguing that the singer’s right to her own counsel had been violated by the court.
Advocates for conservatorship reform have often called for clearer national standards around guardianships and firmer protections around conservatees’ rights to retain their own lawyers. And the Spears case has spurred action on both state and federal levels. After the singer’s emotional testimony in court over the summer, for example, Reps. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) introduced the Free Act, which would give people like Spears the right to petition to have their private conservators or guardians replaced by a public one. (Some #FreeBritney activists, however, opposed empowering even them.)
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| Melanie Mandarano leads hundreds of #FreeBritney supporters on a march Friday in Los Angeles as they wait for the results of the hearing. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post) |
Rio Hamilton left Los Angeles on Saturday morning with an iPhone camera roll full of wide-grinning selfies against festive, fuchsia backgrounds (MacCarley is in one of them) and a feeling of renewed, cautious optimism. Earlier this year, Rio was granted temporary guardianship over his mother. He can now pick her up to take her to church and to some social outings. Advocate Services said it resigned from the arrangement when Rio was appointed guardian. Still, as Rio sees it, work remains to be done for his mother to live as she pleases.
Spending Friday with many people who had gathered to support Spears, he
said, “I was thinking: Is this going to make any kind of difference in
her life? You know, now that this one famous conservatorship,
guardianship thing has been put on the right track?” He’s not certain.
But he’s hopeful.
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